Comments on: “Business Intelligence” made simple

By: Spreadsheets – Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde « Niall Hannon

Spreadsheets – Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde « Niall Hannon — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:07:09 +0000

[...] into a monster, too large for anyone to understand it or maintain it. Comprehensive reporting (or Business Intelligence), if even possible, is very difficult to do due to the multiple versions, different structures and [...]

By: Peter Thomas

Peter Thomas — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:42:33 +0000

My take on trends from back in March:

http://peterthomas.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/trends-in-business-intelligence/

Peter

By: niallhannon

niallhannon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:38:04 +0000

Hi Peter,

Any exciting new trends in the area of BI? Where are things going?

Niall

By: Peter Thomas

Peter Thomas — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:31:43 +0000

I agree that statistical modelling may be over-sold in some industries – at least at this moment in time.

Peter

By: niallhannon

niallhannon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:07:31 +0000

I suppose the difference is that it is a human who is then predicting based on a historical trend rather than any BI system generating predictions. Maybe they both give the same result anyways in all simple cases.

I think a lot of companies would be very happy just to get to the point where they had accurate reporting showing the drop in leads. Having that accurate data to report on is the bigger issue.

By: Peter Thomas

Peter Thomas — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:41:23 +0000

I guess it depends on what you mean by prediction – having spent the first 8 years of my life working in a software house, then I’m thinking that advance notice that the number of leads you are getting for Product X is dropping off might lead you to predict that sales are going to dip and that a product refresh is required. Prediction doesn’t have to be via sophisticated statistical models – sometimes just a graph suffices.

A difference between Business Intelligence (its subset) Business Analytics maybe as per:

http://peterthomas.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/the-dictatorship-of-the-analysts/

Peter

By: niallhannon

niallhannon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:49:21 +0000

Hi Peter, thanks for the comment and your link (interesting read).

I do think there is a place for predictive BI but it is only suitable to a minority of businesses. I think you need a very well defined business model to be able to apply prediction to it. I would think this suits the insurance industry. My assumption here is that financial models are quite broadly used, that it is all about mathematical models?

Other industries, e.g. the software industry, don’t have the amount of low level data required in the use of predictive BI and other things are just difficult to pin down e.g. quality. But that is not the root of the problem.

The main issue is that for most businesses you simply cannot accurately predict the future. There are too many unknowns, the boundaries are too vague and results are subject to a random set of events that have no relationship to past events.

One good book that explains this better than I do is “Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen” by Mark Buchanan.

By: Peter Thomas

Peter Thomas — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:27:15 +0000

Niall,

I was wondering what led you to saying:

“The holy grail of business intelligence is to make inferences and predictions based on historical data. Depending on your type of business this is either going to be a reasonably valuable tool or completely useless. And for the vast majority of companies it is the latter.”

Particularly the last sentence.

You mention making predictions about the future based on history as maybe being relevant to Telcos. To offer just one other example, how about Insurance?

Some thoughts on this are here:

http://peterthomas.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/the-specific-benefits-of-business-intelligence-in-insurance/

I would be interested in your feedback.

Peter

By: Powerful use of Data « Niall Hannon

Powerful use of Data « Niall Hannon — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:07:48 +0000

[...] Powerful use of Data Have a look at this brilliant presentation by a chap named Hans Rosling. This shows the important of data but the power of information (or in my previous post “Business Intelligence”) [...]